I too am looking for gnome on this distro as well. I shall investigate and post result here. Which is more suitable to vectorlinux, dropline or freerock gnome?Kde desktop interface is nice on VL as well.

I wonder if issues may be due to freerock gnome's requirements and dependencies conflicting somehow with gnome libs used in vl already upon installing..

All Gnome apps work in XFCE and Gnome Destktops, but nothing is themed in Gnome hence is looks terrible..

One of the problems you maybe running into is that VL 5.9 is based upon Slackware 12.0 and freerock Gnome is built to support only slackware 12.1. you should be able to upgrade the dependecies you need but you will most likely have to get them from the slackware package sight. http://packages.slackware.it/

My penny is on GSt lacking or compiled on another Gnome version. The slackware diff, is too small to probably have any effect. But also make sure "liboil" is within. Preferable it should been compiled on same Gnome as the GSt or atleast the liboil should fit the running GSt. I mention this, coz I did gnome on Slax and I separated GStreamer from the "gnome-desktop" package. Therefore I often forgot to put it back into also my own modules folder and I have ran into this issue countless times.